Three Days Before the Shooting ... (2 page)

1959

J
UNE
27/J
ULY
17

Writes to Murray, “It has been a most interesting year, full of irritations and discoveries; progress on the novel and a definite deepening of my perception of the themes which I so blindly latched on to. I guess old Hickman is trying to make a man out of me—at this late date.”

1960

J
ANUARY
19

Writes to Bellow, “I haven’t been able to work for two weeks and I feel that I’m falling apart. I find myself in strange places in my dreams and during the days Hickman and Bliss and Severen seem like people out of some faded dream of nobility. They need desperately to be affirmed while I seem incapable
of bringing them fully to life. I hope seeing some of the book in print will improve my morale and this shouldn’t be long now …”

Publishes “And Hickman Arrives” in Saul Bellow’s
Noble Savage
, first excerpt from novel-in-progress.

Publishes “The Roof, the Steeple and the People,”
Quarterly Review of Literature
10, No. 3.

1963

Publishes “It Always Breaks Out,”
Partisan Review
30, No. 1.

1965

Publishes “Juneteenth,”
Quarterly Review of Literature
13, Nos. 3–4.

“Bliss’s Birth” draft, hand-dated by Ellison.

1967

Fire at Plainfield, Massachusetts, home destroys what Ellison calls “a summer’s worth of revisions on my novel.”

1968

“Hickman and Wilhite at Mister Jessie’s.”

1969

Publishes “Night-Talk,”
Quarterly Review of Literature
.

1970

Publishes “A Song of Innocence,”
Iowa Review
1, No. 2.

Becomes Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University (to 1979).

1971

Draft of “Night,” aka “Mother Strothers.”

Draft of “Through the Lilt and Tear,” long variant of opening for Book II.

1972

J
UNE
/J
ULY

Completes revisions of Book I and II typescripts.

Draft of Lonnie Barnes speech from Rockmore’s.

1973

F
EBRUARY

Publishes “Cadillac Flambé,”
American Review
16.

1974

N
OVEMBER
14

Random House writes to extend delivery date of second novel from August 17, 1965, to September 30, 1975.

1977

Publishes “Backwacking, a Plea to the Senator,”
Massachusetts Review
18.

1978

J
UNE
5

Random House writes to extend delivery date for second novel from August 17, 1965, to May 1, 1980.

Revises “A Song of Innocence.”

Revises “Through the Lilt and Tear.”

1981

N
OVEMBER

Forty-page hand-edited draft entitled “Bliss” typed and filed under “Bliss-Hickman (Final).” (Additional drafts dated 1959.)

1982

J
ANUARY
8

Purchases Osborne 1 computer.

1983

J
UNE
20

Writes to literary critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke in computer-printed letter, “You’re probably right about a sequel to I.M. being impossible, but even if it weren’t I’d have no desire to undertake it. I’m having enough trouble just making a meaningful form out of my yarn concerning a little boy preacher who rises to
high estate
and comes asunder. There are all kinds of interesting incidents in it, but if they don’t add up it’ll fall as rain into the ocean of meaningless words. I guess what’s bothering me right now is working out a form for that N
EXT PHASE
of which you write. // Anyway, I’m still writing—or will be at it again as soon as we can get out of the city and end up in the Berkshire hills ….”

O
CTOBER
11

Purchases Osborne Executive computer.

1985

J
ANUARY
9
(POSTMARK DATE ON ENVELOPE)

Writes note of frustration about his computer: “Osborne // I’m writing this on an EXECUTIVE computer and an IBM Quiet printer that am so ignorant of the how to patch the damn thing that I’m wasting a good part of my investment.”

1988

J
ANUARY
7

Purchases IBM computer.

O
CTOBER

Hires friend David Sarser to transfer files from old computer to new computer. Transfer erases all file dates prior to 1988.

1992

M
AY
–S
EPTEMBER

Revises all but three “Hickman in Oklahoma” files from “Hickman in Georgia and Oklahoma” section.

1993

J
ULY

Revises all of “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” section on computer.

D
ECEMBER
30

Saves last known file, “Rockmore.”

1994

A
PRIL
16

Dies at his home on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive.

*
Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
, ed. Albert Murray and John F. Callahan (2000), is the single best source on Ellison’s progress and perspective on the second novel from 1951 to 1960.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE SHOOTING …

I

W
HEN
R
ALPH
E
LLISON DIED
, on April 16, 1994, he left behind no explicit instructions for what should be done with the multiple drafts of his unfinished, untitled second novel. What he left instead was an expansive archive of handwritten notes, typewritten pages, and computer files that he had been at work on since the early 1950s. In an interview just two months before his death, Ellison affirmed that “the novel has got my attention now. I work every day, so there will be something very soon.” This undoubtedly came as welcome news for readers of Ellison’s fiction, who had been waiting some forty years since the publication of Ellison’s 1952 classic,
Invisible Man
, for the promised second novel. For them, “soon” was not nearly soon enough.

Taking Ellison at his word, one might reasonably have expected to find among his papers a single manuscript very near to completion, bearing evidence of the difficult choices he had made during the protracted period of the novel’s composition. Or one might have expected, perhaps, that Ellison’s manuscript-in-progress might resemble F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Last Tycoon
, a fragment with a clearly drafted, clearly delineated beginning and middle, whose author’s notes and drafts pointed toward two or three endings, each of which followed and resolved the projected novel as a whole. Or, to cite a more contemporary example, it might have resembled Roberto Bolaño’s unfinished novel
2666;
upon its posthumous publication in 2008, Bolaño’s editor remarked that, had the author lived to see it through to publication, “its dimensions, its general content would by no means have been very different from what they are now.” In the extreme, Or one might have expected, something like James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
, a glorious mess of a novel that defies the very generic constraints of the form.

Ellison left behind something else entirely: a series of related narrative
fragments, several of which extend to over three hundred manuscript pages in length, that appear to cohere without truly completing one another. In fact, the thousands of handwritten notes, typewritten drafts, mimeographed pages and holographs, dot-matrix and laser printouts, testify to the massive and sustained effort Ellison exerted upon his fiction, but also to his ultimate failure to complete his manuscript so long in progress. In Three Days we have a work that both meets and does not meet Ellison’s expectations, expressed in his 1956 essay “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” that “every serious novel” be “a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties, and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.”

As the facts about Ellison’s second novel come into focus, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine him completing the book even if he had enjoyed a run of good years beyond 1994. This is not to say that he would have stopped writing. Far from it. Ellison once said by way of describing himself as a novelist, “I’m a fast writer, but a slow worker.” This may help explain the seeming paradox of his writing thousands of pages over the second half of the twentieth century, yet never mastering many of the basic textual challenges presented by his material, not the least of which was the “very stern discipline” of bringing his narrative to some kind of resolution. Instead, he drafted multiple versions of the same handful of scenes, sometimes with subtle, sometimes with striking differences, while seeming never to have composed the necessary connective episodes that could have made his fiction whole.

With all the mystery that has surrounded the second novel over the years, it seems only natural that public discussion has centered almost exclusively upon why Ellison never published the book. Speculation was generated by a handful of published excerpts and the increasing secrecy with which Ellison guarded the novel from his closest friends and even from his editor. Nonetheless, in the face of so much evidence of literary activity, a new question looms: What is it about this material—either in its focus, form, or theme—that kept Ellison writing so much for so long?

Over the decades Ellison’s various iterations of his characters, plot, and themes testify to an artist in the process of stylistic evolution. Uncoiled, the serpentine fragments of the surviving, unfinished work show a writer responding to an America evolving from Jim Crow to Civil Rights to Vietnam to the Digital Age during the span of the novel’s composition. The basic plot of his novel as it emerges in these manuscripts centers upon the connection, estrangement, and reconciliation of two characters. The one is a black jazzman-turned-preacher named Alonzo Hickman, the other a racist “white” New England Senator named Adam Sunraider, formerly known as Bliss—a child of indeterminate race whom Hickman had raised from infancy to adolescence. The action of the novel concerns Hickman’s efforts to stave off Sunraider’s assassination at the hands of the Senator’s own estranged
son, a young man named Severen. We follow Hickman from his home in Georgia to the Oklahoma City of his jazz-playing youth to the nation’s capital, in search of clues that will not only save the Senator but also perhaps unlock the mystery of the child Bliss’s disappearance decades before and his reemergence as the race-baiting Sunraider, a political archenemy of the very people who raised him and continue to love him.

Along the way Hickman reconnects with his old flame, Janey Glover; meets Love New, a half-black, half-Cherokee medicine man who weaves a mysterious fable for Hickman of fathers and sons; and encounters Cliofus, a “teller of tall tales” with the gift of gab who regales a crowd of onlookers at a bar called the Cave of the Winds. Those familiar with the excerpts from the novel published in Ellison’s lifetime will celebrate the return of familiar characters like LeeWillie Minifees, the black jazzman who burns his own Cadillac on Senator Sunraider’s lawn in an act of defiance and protest, and Welborn McIntyre, the white newspaper reporter in whose voice Ellison wrote the only first-person narration in the entire novel. These are only some of the voices and perspectives that emerge in the parts of the manuscripts that have never been in print before. Ellison was writing a novel concerning betrayal and redemption, love and loss, black and white, fathers and sons. It is a novel that takes as its theme the very nature of America’s democratic promise to make the nation’s practice live up to its principles in the lives of its citizens, regardless of race, place, or circumstance.

Juneteenth
, published posthumously in 1999, may offer clues about Ellison’s difficulty in striking a balance between the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies of his second novel. The proposition driving
Juneteenth
is that the center of Ellison’s saga consists of the story of Reverend Hickman and Senator Sunraider from the Senator’s birth as Bliss to his death. Accordingly, Book II, with its central focus on the Senator in the present of the assassination and the past of his boyhood ministry as Reverend Hickman’s messenger, is the chief source of
Juneteenth
. A long separate manuscript, titled “Bliss’s Birth,” also uses the occasion of the boy’s coming into the world, literally midwifed by Hickman, to fill in much of Hickman’s past as triggered by the then jazzman’s reflections on his and his family’s situation in the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth century.